Coming to Terms with Fascism in Italy

Mussolini casts a long shadow. R J.B. Bosworth describes how Italians of both the left and the right have used memories of his long dictatorship to underpin their own versions of history and politics.

Benito Mussolini became prime minister of Italy in October 1922 after leading the March on Rome, a paramilitary Fascist coup against liberal Italy’s parliamentary institutions. In January 1925, he openly announced his dictatorship and became known as the Duce, or leader. From here on he boasted that Fascism was both a revolution and a regime, destined to remake Italians and to rule them for the foreseeable future. In fact, Mussolini fell in July 1943, after the Allied invasion of Sicily, a political casualty of Italy’s disastrous performance in the Second World War. But the story had a vicious coda when, in September 1943, the Germans occupied northern Italy and restored Mussolini there as a sort of puppet dictator of the radical fascist Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI, or Italian Social Republic). For the next twenty months, while Italy was fought over by the Allied and Nazi-Fascist armies, Italians engaged in a form of civil war. Of Italy’s 450,000 war deaths, about half occurred in this period.